In previous articles we've discussed why you website's audience is so important and we've gone over some techniques that will help you learn more about your audience. But the interaction between you and your audience is one-way street. Loyal visitors and members of your online community want information about what's going on with your website almost as much as you want information about them. The major difference though is that you have significant incentive to gather information whereas your visitors would like the information but have little incentive to go out of their way to get it. So you're going to have to be the one who puts in the effort into keeping your community informed.

When you begin planning how you're going to keep your community informed you're going to have to cover three major factors; medium of delivery, level of detail and information timelines.

When it comes to medium of delivery, the question you need to ask yourself is, "How are my visitors going to get this information?" There many different methods, but the most effective will be: